40 



TREE ANCESTORS 



or camels, and yet most of our familiar forest trees are of more 

 ancient lineage, and some, such as the sequoia, go back almost to 

 the dawn of the tiny original progenitors of the warm blooded 

 animals. Although the book o^f the future is tightly sealed that 

 of the past needs but understanding wedded to imagination to be 

 legible, even though its torn pages are the rocks of the earth's 

 crust. The chapters of this great book of history where the records 

 of the sequoia occur are those chapters, pages upon pages of heaped 

 up shales, sandstones and swamp deposits, commencing with late 



Fig. 5. Cone-bearing Twig of the Big Tree of the Sierra NEViUJAS 

 (About f Natural Size) 



Jurassic time and continuing down the ages to the present. The 

 entries of the sequoia ancestry comprise innumerable leafy twigs, 

 many cones, fragments of wood, sometimes seeds, and occasionally, 

 as in Yellowstone Park and at Florissant, Colorado, mighty silici- 

 fied trunks, buried by tremendous showers of volcanic ashes and 

 petrified in successive upright layers into forests of stone. 



Sequoia remains resist decay admirably, pro'bably because of 

 the great amount of tannin that they contain, so that their chances 

 of preservation as fossils in the rocks are much better than the 



